“A QUIET PASSION”: Mighty words

Like most of Terence Davies’ films, “A Quiet Passion” moves at a glacial pace that taxes an audience’s patience.

Stick with it, though, and you’ll get Cynthia Nixon in the performance of a lifetime.

As poet Emily Dickinson, Nixon (most of us will always know her as the red-headed Miranda on HBO’s “Sex and the City”) plays a physically passive character. About the most exciting thing Emily Dickinson does is leisurely walk through her family’s 19th-century garden beneath a parasol.

But beneath that civilized, socially-acceptable exterior there beats an angry heart, and periodically it surges to the forefront with dazzling results.

Davies’ screenplay follows Emily from her graduation from a girls’ school (in early scenes she’s played by Emma Bell) to her death in 1886 at age 55. With the exception of an opening scene set at the school, Davies film unfolds entirely in the Dickinson family home in Amherst, Massachusetts — fittingly so, since by middle age Emily was something of a recluse who devoted herself to her ailing mother.

She also devoted herself to her writing, though Dickinson died before her work was widely distributed. Today, of course, she’s regarded as one of best poets this country ever produced, but during her lifetime she saw only about a dozen poems printed in local newspapers. And those were heavily tinkered with by editors who disapproved of her creative punctuation and other eccentricities.

Film biographies of writers are usually odd affairs. Nothing terribly interesting in a person scribbling with a pen or pecking at a typewriter. Davies includes a few shots of Emily writing, but mostly he uses Nixon’s voice-over narration to read relevant Dickinson works.

What the film is really about are Emily’s interactions with her family and friends, and how they reveal her mind and personality. Some of these confrontations are genteel and measured, others volcanic.

Cynthia Nixon, Keith Carradine

Emily ‘s father (Keith Carradine) is a political progressive who nevertheless harbors traditional ideas about the roles of the sexes. Still, he indulges his daughter’s wickedly caustic dissections of sexual norms and seems even to encourage them.

Emily’s sister Vinnie (Jennifer Ehle) appears almost as witty as Emily, though apparently without any artistic gifts. (One has to ask how two such smart, verbally facile women remained spinsters. And then you realize you’ve answered your own question.)

Emily’s brother Austin (Duncan Duff) leads the most conventional life, studying law, practicing it with his father and marrying. Yet his middle-aged affair with a married woman triggers Emily’s fiercest condemnation. We understand where she’s coming from (common morality, and all that) but one wonders if her own celibate existence doesn’t come into play here.

For Nixon’s Emily Dickinson is a woman of passion with no outlet save that of the paper and pen. (“This is my letter to the world that never wrote to me.”) There are also suggestions that she may have had some mental and/or emotional issues.

Don’t go looking for a plot. “A Quiet Passion” is a series of scenes over many years, with each precisely calculated exchange of dialogue designed to illuminate another aspect of Emily’s complex mind and patterns of thought.

The film isn’t warm and fuzzy. This Emily carries with her an electric charge of bitterness that keeps us at arm’s length; she can be a conventional, dutiful daughter in one scene and a ball of fierce resentment the next.

It figures, though. It would have taken a tremendously complex mind to create that transcendent poetry.